West goes East and boobs

Picasso’s Women of Algiers (Version O) is the painting that just keeps on giving to news outlets. The world-record sale of this late Picasso daub for £116-million has started a story that just won’t die.

The latest twist, at the end of last week, was the buyer’s identity: reportedly the secret billionaire purchaser was Qatar’s Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani.

That, it seems, was empty speculation.
Christie’s has denied the story and the Telegraph has removed its online report.

What’s fascinating, though, given the apparent lack of a factual basis to the buyer’s unmasking, is how the flaky story was interpreted. Qatar’s Islamic decency laws, reported the excited Western media, meant the painting would have to be locked away and never shown in public. The sheikh would have to keep his treasure a shameful secret.

Fascinating. An image of Islamic intolerance and religious censorship appears to have been created on a totally fictional basis. Don’t let Qatar suppress Picasso’s lust! Save our Cubist boobs from Muslim bigotry!

Even if the story about the painting going to Qatar were true – and this oil-rich, art-loving state must still be a plausible destination for the world’s most expensive painting – you don’t have to be the author of Orientalism, Edward Said, to be struck by the fantasy of oriental intolerance that some media outlets have dreamt up. There were no hard facts at all, and certainly nothing to prove the painting would be censored by Qatar.

But there is very solid evidence that it offends the conservative Christian scruples of some in the West.

We have no proof that a Middle Eastern billionaire is sitting on this salacious picture, but we do know that the breasts in the painting were blurred out by a Fox news channel. How peculiar, to project this bizarre outbreak of American puritanism on to Qatar.

We are modern: they are bigots. So how come “we” are the ones censoring Picasso ?

As it happens, Picasso’s painting is itself a fantasy of the Orient. Picasso, in his villa in the South of France, created for himself an imaginary harem of buxom babes. Women of Algiers (Version O) is one of his remakes of an 1834 masterpiece by Eugène Delacroix in the Louvre.

The original Women of Algiers by Delacroix is a richly coloured, flamboyantly sensual scene of Algerian concubines smoking hashish from a hookah in the seclusion of their harem apartment.

How the West’s image of Arabia has reversed since the 19th century. Once, the Islamic world was equated with sexual licence and harem decadence.

Today, Islam is imagined as sexually prudish, although, in fact, it is Christian theology that is darkly preoccupied with sexual sin.